Now here is something interesting. As we wrote in our PC Performance Analysis article, Assassin’s Creed: Origins requires a really powerful CPU. We also noted that the game uses the Denuvo anti-tamper tech. And according to the latest reports, a new implementation of the Denuvo is causing 30-40% additional CPU usage in Ubisoft’s title.

Let’s start from the beginning. According to the scene group Revolt, Ubisoft has added VMProtect over Denuvo. Our guess is that the French team did this in order to protect its title from pirates. After all, we’ve seen all the latest Denuvo games getting cracked in less than a day. However, and at the time of writing, there is still no crack for Assassin’s Creed Origins.

That’s all good for Ubisoft, however Revolt claimed that this implementation brings a severe CPU performance hit. According to its reports, there is an additional 30-40% CPU performance hit with this new implementation.

Now we don’t know whether this claim is true at all, so take it with a grain of salt. Unfortunately there is no way to test whether Denuvo causes this abnormally high CPU usage in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. And that’s because if and when the game gets cracked, VMProtect and Denuvo will still run in the background. In short, and as with all Denuvo cracks, this will simply bypass the protections tools.

The only ones who can provide a truly “Denuvo-less” version of Assassin’s Creed: Origins is Ubisoft. However, and since Denuvo is still present in all of its previous games, we don’t expect the French company to remove it any time soon.

As said, take this with a grain of salt. Still, it will be interesting to see whether and if Denuvo and/or Ubisoft will respond to these reports!

When a software pirate says anything bad about DRM without providing substantial proof, you should be very, very skeptical.

Denuvo in the past has has little impact on performance (pirates tried to claim that Denuvo ruined SSDs when Denuvo was brand new, remember?), and having something take nearly half of a cutting edge CPU's resources is an extraordinary claim. So far, I haven't seen anyone providing extraordinary evidence.

I'm so fucking tired of outrage culture.

Still having said that, when games are laying 2-3 implementations of DRM on a game, it's getting a little fucking stupid.